with crystal water? Nothing but the moon in her fulness, shining in the
midst of an uncloudless sky!"

_Transitions of Decay_.--I have often observed that the more proudly a
mansion has been tenanted in the day of its prosperity, the humbler are
its inhabitants in the day of its decline, and that the palace of the
king, commonly ends in being the nestling place of the beggar.

_A Factotum_.--A portly old fellow with a bottle nose, who goes about in
a rusty garb with a cocked hat of oil-skin and a red cockade. He is one
of the legitimate sons of the Alhambra, and has lived here all his life,
filling various offices; such as deputy alguazil, sexton of the
parochial church, and marker of a fives-court established at the foot of
one of the towers. He is as poor as a rat, but as proud as he is ragged,
boasting of his descent from the illustrious house of Aguilar, from
which sprang Gonsalvo of Cordova, the grand captain. Nay, he actually
bears the name of Alonzo de Aguilar, so renowned in the history of the
conquest. It is a whimsical caprice of fortune to present, in the
grotesque person of this tatterdemalion, a namesake and descendant of
the proud Alonzo de Aguilar, the mirror of Andalusian chivalry, leading
an almost mendicant existence about this once haughty fortress, which
his ancestor aided to reduce: yet such might have been the lot of the
descendants of Agamemnon and Achilles, had they lingered about the ruins
of Troy.

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MANNERS & CUSTOMS OF ALL NATIONS.